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Poland ‘only state in Europe to properly honour Holocaust’: ambassador

In an op-ed piece published by Israel’s Haaretz newspaper, Ambassador Marek Magierowski said that no other nation in Europe could equal Poland’s “scrupulous care” of “the material legacy of the Holocaust.”

Magierowski noted in his piece that Jews had lived in Poland for hundreds of years and said that their “culture imbued Poland’s.”

He also said that his country was “lucky to have a large, vivacious community of Polish Jewry in Israel.”

Some of these people are in their eighties and nineties, speak “impeccable Polish” and are “profoundly embedded” in both Polish and Jewish culture, Magierowski added.

He asserted that Poland is arguably the only European country “in which the head of state regularly presides over ceremonies commemorating the dark chapters of the history of their relationship with the Jewish community.”

In no other country is “such scrupulous care … taken of the material legacy of the Holocaust,” Magierowski argued

A new museum will be set up in the centre of the Polish capital by 2023 to show the World War II story of the Warsaw ghetto, top government officials announced last year.

The new Warsaw Ghetto Museum will honour the "tragic act" of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto insurgents, who “fought for [their] dignity under hopeless circumstances,” Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki told reporters at the time.

Meanwhile, Warsaw’s Museum of the History of Polish Jews, which opened in October 2014, documents the millennium-old history of Polish Jews and their contribution to various aspects of Polish political, economic and cultural life. It is located at the site of the former Jewish ghetto, just opposite the Monument to the Heroes of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

The Polish president has paid tribute to the last World War II-era Warsaw ghetto fighter, who died in Israel last month.

Radio Poland